


Alone

by oozio



Category: Coco (2017)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 12:55:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12984525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oozio/pseuds/oozio
Summary: a conspiracy theoryAfter his best friend choked on a chorizo and died, Ernesto de la Cruz took their music and became one of the most successful musicians that Mexico has ever seen. A century later, his legacy refuses to die, but Ernesto thinks he's had enough.





	Alone

Even as the bell closed over him, Ernesto knew that he would be famous for ever, and ever, and ever.

His posters were plastered over every back alley cranny in Santa Cecilia. His statue sat in plazas and music halls all over the country, and a hundred aspiring musicians whispered daily to him fervent prayers, steel guitar strings cold under their fingertips. So long as Mexico existed, and music, his name would be tied to their history as surely as the moon was tied to the sky. 

Fans and biographers alike bemoaned his early death. What he could've done with a few more years! The songs he could've written, the home he might have returned to, the money he would have made!

Not that he didn't make money in the afterlife. In some ways, the revelry only grew. A thousand candles cast fantastic lights into every dark corner, he owned entire buildings made of guitars, and the once-rich-and-powerful sharpened their heads thin to try to squeeze into his parties. The reputation of Ernesto de la Cruz was already made, and he needed only pull down his sunglasses to receive the welcome of a king. Here he could do as he wanted; at this ultimate destination, he could tie up all the loose ends.

He found his old friend Hector and apologized for not giving him credit for the songs that he had written. They cried together when Hector's wife refused to forgive him, and drank to good looks and the grace of the gods in heaven when Ernesto's wife did. 

The loneliness that had plagued him since he left his family innumerable years ago was cured. He had his wife, his child, his friends, and much the same gaggle of associates as had flocked around him in life. For a short while, everyone came together- but one by one they began to pass into the next beyond. His family went first, and then his producers, and then eventually even the man who had accidentally killed him. He found himself alone again.

Thereafter, on each Day of the Dead, he threw the biggest party in the afterlife, spending the evening drinking and trying to not remember his wife's expression the first time that she sank into the flower bridge. Amid the party goers he felt safe. He only invited the famous and long-dead; they were all the same, he knew. They were all universally loved and totally alone, immortal in this world where reputation dictated lifespan.

Somehow Hector held on. As the years passed, Ernesto began to see in him some of the signs he'd witnessed in all the others so many times before: the dulling of the skin, the oddly loose walk, the occasional flashes of gold, and the long stretches of sullen silence.

And so they'd hatched a plan to trade Ernesto's immortalizing fame for Hector's obscurity. It was what he'd owed Hector for over a century now, and the plan's execution required only a costume, a photo, and a desperate boy. "We'll act it out just like in my movie," Ernesto had said, eyes glittering, unable to completely relinquish theater even in his second death.

But obviously they'd gone wrong somewhere.

He thought that he would be free by now, that after a few years of withering under the bell, he would fade away, forgotten by the world. But each day he only felt heavier, as if the newly born hatred of the living had taken solid form and deposited among his ancient bones. After all, who ever forgot a villain?

Now he received nothing but dust and curses on the Day of the Dead. There was nothing he could do; Ernesto de la Cruz would be famous, for ever, and ever, and ever.

**Author's Note:**

> QAQ writing is so hard wtf


End file.
